I had visions of Hong Kong as a romantic city with curved Chinese roofs and weeping willow trees. I was looking forward to immersing myself in this exotic environment. It was in June 1968 at the age of twenty two that I headed out to Asia for the first time. I took holidays on my way to Hong Kong and I was able to experience parts of the world that I had previously visited only in my imagination: in Italy, the magnificence of Rome and its disorderly traffic; in Israel, the timelessness of a starlit summer night over the ancient city of Jerusalem and the tension of a country after a recent war; in Iran, the exoticism of the Teheran bazaar and its reckless taxis bedecked with Christmas lights in June; in India, the splendour of the Taj Mahal and the turmoil of life in New Delhi; and in Thailand, the bright colours of Bangkok and the elegance of its people and culture. My excitement about my new assignment in Hong Kong was building throughout my trip.
Finally I touched down in Hong Kong, where I was met by the official car of the Canadian High Commission. As we drove through congested Kowloon with its forest of drab, gray, high-rise apartment buildings, I was suddenly brought back to reality. Hong Kong was no Shangri-la. However, as our car got onto the vehicular ferry to cross over from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island, I was suddenly treated to a waterborne kaleidoscope of ocean freighters, barges, war ships, Chinese junks and pleasure craft against a backdrop of modern skyscrapers and stately colonial buildings, all overlooked by Victoria Peak on the Hong Kong side.
Living in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, as it was called in those days, I always felt a little hemmed in. Before you could go anywhere you had to fly out or take a boat. China was essentially closed, and this could be depressing. However, the least expensive way to cheer myself up was to pay ten or fifteen Hong Kong cents to cross the harbour on the Star Ferry. I never got tired of studying the skyline and the traffic on the water during this fifteen minute crossing.
For the first months I lived on the Hong Kong side near Stanley and Repulse Bay. I had an unobstructed view of a romantic little bay where I could satisfy my desire for the exotic by studying the Chinese transport junks plying up and down the sparkling turquoise waters of the South China Sea. This relatively sparsely populated part of the Crown Colony had beaches, leafy semi-tropical vegetation and a large European population. It was like a resort. I was expected to live there and attend the Hong Kong University where all previous diplomatic language students had studied. But after a few months I chose to live and study on the more densely populated Kowloon side, and I enrolled at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Just as I had wanted to immerse myself in French culture in order to learn French, I took the same attitude into my Chinese learning.
Hong Kong is Cantonese speaking, and therefore does not offer immersion in Mandarin. However, it is Chinese and did offer an intense exposure to Chinese culture. I was taken out of my comfortable Western cocoon and exposed daily to the sounds and smells of the busy streets and markets, the shops selling Chinese medicine and other exotic products, the energy of so many people bustling in street-side workshops or peddling products they often carried balanced on a pole. Near my school or in the crowded Tsimshatsui district of Kowloon, I could eat inexpensive noodles or curry rice lunches with workers or enjoy sumptuous Cantonese meals in luxury restaurants. There were numerous restaurants representing the cuisine of many different parts of China: Beijing, Shandong, Sichuan, Chao Zhou and more, all squeezed into narrow, crowded streets. This was my daily living environment as I studied Chinese. Indirectly I was being conditioned to accept the language.
I still remember my lunch-time conversations in Mandarin with my teachers, over Hui Guo Rou (braised garlic pork), Man Tou (steamed bread) and eel soup. These informal gatherings were my most pleasant and relaxed learning experiences. The teachers would talk of their childhood in China or other interesting subjects. At a Chinese meal, everyone helps themselves from common serving dishes with their chopsticks. I have always had a good appetite, and as the only Canadian at the table I was quickly nicknamed "jia na da" ("Canada" in Mandarin) with the emphasis on "na da," meaning "to reach and take a big piece." I made the right decision in choosing the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Chinese Language School was run by one of the most effective language teachers I have met, Mr. Liu Ming. He welcomed people to the Chinese language and made foreigners feel that they could learn Mandarin. He insisted on hard work from the learner, because he himself was an energetic and hard-working man. He inspired me to commit to my new language challenge and was always flexible in accommodating my requests. The staff of the language school were very friendly and encouraging.
At first I was dependent on my one-on-one sessions with the teachers. However, soon I began to find the classes were a strain. I was obliged to go to class for three hours every morning. Sometimes I was tired and hardly able to pay attention. The effectiveness of the teachers varied. Some teachers were intent on giving me explanations in English, which I found particularly irksome. The fashion in those days was to emphasize drills, which were often tiring and annoying. The best sessions were those when the teacher would just talk about some interesting subject. I did most of my learning at these more informal conversational sessions as well as when studying intensely at home.
It was the energy of the Director, Liu Ming, who watched over us and challenged us that really inspired me to work hard. The texts we used were from the Yale-in-China program. The first text was called Chinese Dialogues and was set in the China of the pre-Liberation period. The dialogues described a certain Mr. Smith living, working and traveling around in China from Shanghai to Nanking and Beiping (as it was called in the Kuomintang days). This context was divorced from the reality of late 1960s China, which was caught up in the Cultural Revolution. I remember very little of the content of this textbook, but I realize that an artificial text like this is probably necessary at the beginning stage of language learning.
